Proverbs 4:23 (KJV) tells us to “Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.” To keep our hearts is to guard them. God tells us that we must do this with not just some, but with ALL diligence. We must put careful, persistent, and consistent effort into guarding what goes in our hearts and what comes out of them. If we’re honest, as brothers in Christ, this is something we don’t always pay as much attention to as we should. We see something about a woman that’s appealing physically, and we don’t do a lot of mental processing before we leap into situations. This can be a costly mistake.
A person said to me the other day that he still didn’t know what his purpose is. He’s around the same age at my dad, so it seemed odd to me that after being on this planet over 50 years, he’s clueless about this. In God’s Word, He often tells us that He doesn’t want us to be ignorant. God is light, and light illuminates. It brings with it things like clarity, understanding, and greater knowledge. God is all about having His people operate from a place of intelligence. There’s plenty of stuff that He didn’t put in His Word, and those are the things that we can’t know. But even if we lived ten thousand years, we still would not exhaust the knowledge that He actually has placed in His Word.
1Peter 1:3 says that everything we need to know about life and Godliness is contained in God’s Word. Heavenly Father would not keep the knowledge of our purpose hidden from us. Our purpose is to have fellowship and relationship with Him, and to let His love and Spirit move in us. Galatians 5:25(NLT) tells us, “Since we are living by the Spirit, let us follow the Spirit’s leading in every part of our lives.” This is a moment by moment choice and decision. And the decision that we consciously make each morning to walk in the Spirit is a decision that gets expressed through faith. We don’t know what the day will hold, but we should trust God to back and steer our steps.
Sometimes, we don’t follow the Spirit, because we want to do the thing we feel will bring us immediate pleasure. That’s not guarding our hearts, and it’s not walking in purpose. It’s letting the flesh rule our decisions. This comes between our relationship with God, and when our relationship with God is off and we are out of fellowship, everything in our lives will be affected by it. Some kind of way, we’ve got to deal with this, because it’s holding us back. It’s causing us to miss opportunities for increase. But more than this, it’s blocking us from building momentum in life.
We hear a lot about God’s grace, His unmerited favor. It’s not a free pass to sin, and a lot of us try to use it this way. Jesus Christ told us to be careful about the kind of treasures we’re storing up. Are they ‘sin’ treasures, or are they the kind that will keep in heaven? He warned us in Matthew 6:19-21(NLT), “19 Don’t store up treasures here on earth, where moths eat them and rust destroys them, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 Store your treasures in heaven, where moths and rust cannot destroy, and thieves do not break in and steal. 21 Wherever your treasure is, there the desires of your heart will also be.” Every choice and decision that we make to honor God by living out the example of Christ will store up something awesome for us.
Momentum in life is built from this storing up. We can draw from it to move forward with greater consistency and success. So often we complain about not catching a break, about taking one step forward and two steps backward. This is when we’re moving but going nowhere fast, and it’s because we’re not tapping into the momentum of heaven. Jesus Christ told us in Matthew 6:21 that whatever our treasure, sin or pleasing God, that’s telling the truth about what is in our hearts. The choices we make are building us up or tearing us down. Let’s try to make the ones that please God.■
Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
“What’s Your Treasure” written by JMack. 4theChristianMan.Com© 2018. All rights reserved. All praise and honor to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior.